I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste.

Unlike you though, spam (at least recently) has not been a very strong issue of mine. If I had to name one, I'd say that "personalization" of the results was the worst offender to the quality my search results, and the positive thing is that we can turn that one off.

As crazy as it sounds, I wish another good search engine comes, as Google feels more and more like the "least bad" option, rather than the "good" one to me, and I'm just talking about search results, voluntarily excluding privacy & other topics from the debate.